Re: Bill Joy leaves Sun

From: Paul Eggert (eggert_at_twinsun.com)
Date: 09/12/03 

Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 15:34:07 -0700

At 11 Sep 2003 12:21:17 GMT, Casper H.S. *** <Casper.***@Sun.COM> writes:

> I had explained to me that this was not just "humorlessness" but
> also a problem with sellign stuff to non-native speakers;

So, potential foreign buyers might kick the tires on a Sun system but
walk away because they read the tunefs man page and don't like the
joke? That's hard to believe, but if's a real worry then Sun can
easily leave the joke out of translations to languages where it falls
flat.

The joke is still in the HP-UX tunefs man page, and the sky hasn't
fallen on HP yet. And their Unix servers sold fairly well last
quarter, I've heard.

Anyway, Sun could easily dispell McVoy's jinx by putting that joke
back in. And I'm sure that Sun users worldwide would be happy to
volunteer to translate it to other languages. Here's Babelfish's
attempt to translate "You can tune a file system, but you can't tuna
fish." into German:

  Sie kann ein Dateisystem abstimmen, aber Sie koennen nicht Thunfische.

(That 'oe' is really an 'o' with an umlaut over it.) I think it's
kind of funny already in German, but perhaps you can do a better
translation. My German is pretty much limited to ordering beers and
saying 'excuse me'.

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